Een nieuwe uitgave van de klassieke Inleiding tot het marxisme van Ernest Mandel.
Wat zijn de wortels van ongelijkheid? Wat kenmerkt een kapitalistische samenleving? Hoe ontstond de arbeidersbeweging en hoe zou een socialistische omwenteling eruit kunnen zien? In Inleiding tot het marxisme bespreekt Ernest Mandel deze kernvragen van het marxisme op toegan
Het Kapitaal is een van de meest invloedrijke boeken in de wereldgeschiedenis. Naast dat het zeer invloedrijks is – de marxistische waardetheorie staat nog steeds als een huis – is het ook een notoir lastig boek om zelfstandig te lezen en te doorgronden. Een inleiding in Het Kapitaal van Karl Marx geeft inzicht in de drie delen van Marx’ meesterwerk. Helder maar zonder versimpeling bespreekt Heinrich de rol van arbeid, waarde, uitbuiting en kapitaal bij Marx. Michael Heinrich laat zien hoe Marx de ‘spookachtige’ logica van het kapitalisme analyseerde.
Dialectical reason is, when set against the dominant mode of reason, unreason: only in encompassing and cancelling this mode does it become itself reasonable.
– Theodor W. Adorno, Minima moralia
The history of the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification, the POUM, is the history of thousands of men and women who fought to transform the world and would be at the centre of one of the most profound revolutions of the 20th century.
Founded in September 1935, of the many dissident communist groupings that emerged internationally in the 1930s, the POUM was the most important. The largest workers party in Catalonia before the Civil War, the POUM, it had in its ranks the two most outstanding Marxist theorists of the time in Spain: Joaquín Maurín and Andreu Nin.
On November 6 we lost our friend and comrade Paul Mepschen. Paul was for many years a supporter of the IIRE.
In late November and early December the IIRE will again organize an international three-week school for socialist activists. This 'Ecosocialist school' is a unique opportunity for activists to come together, learn, exchange experiences and build networks. To facilitate participation, we keep costs as low as possible and, if necessary, help fund travel costs for activists from the Global South.
The race for profit is widening social inequalities and destroying the planet. As the productivist catastrophe is worsening day by day, democratic and revolutionary socialism must be rethought to meet needs within ecological limits. This Manifesto adopted in February 2025 by the Fourth International raises the banner of a civilisational alternative: ecosocialism.
Introduction:
Sixty years ago, on October 1, 1965 the Indonesian army set in motion its plans to seize power from president Sukarno and to destroy the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), one of the main forces supporting the president. In the article below, dated November 1965, Mandel criticizes the political approach of the PKI in the preceding period.
The two world wars and the catastrophes of the period between (victory of Nazism, Stalinism, the Spanish Civil War) hardly leave the cumulative vision of historical meaning and progress intact. Nietzsche, Péguy and Sorel already vigorously rejected historical fetishism and the ideology of progress that puts vigilance to sleep in the face of an inevitable accumulation of facts.
Walter Benjamin had a profound understanding of the intimate links between conceptions of positivist origin and the representation of mechanical time, ‘homogeneous and empty’.
Well beyond its own marginal activist circles, Situationism, of which Guy Debord was the central character, coloured the spirit of the times in the 1960s and had a diffuse but important influence on the movements of 1968. Debord’s book The Society of the Spectacle (1967), in which he developed a critique of consumer society, urban alienation and generalized commodity fetishism, could be read as a precursor of the 1968 movements.